Haraway, Donna (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’ Feminist Studies 14.3: 575-599.
Define social constructionism: A theory of knowledge in sociology and communication theory that examines the development of jointly constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality.
Define relativism: the doctrine that knowledge, truth and morality exist in relation to culture, society or historical context, and are not absolute.
"feminists have both selectively and flexibly used and been trapped by two poles of a tempting dichotomy on the question of objectivity." p.576
"no insider's perspective is privileged, because all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as power moves, not moves toward truth. So, from the strong social constructionist perspective, why should we be cowed by scientists' descriptions of their activity and accomplishments; they and their patrons have stakes in throwing sand in our eyes." p.576
"Social constructionists make clear that official ideologies about objectivity and scientific method are particularly bad guides to how scientific knowledge is actually made." p.576
"social constructions might maintain that the ideological doctrine of scientific method and all the philosophical verbiage about epistemology were cooked up to distract our attention from getting to know the world effectively by practicing the sciences." p.577
Science is "rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power." p.577
"artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric. Practice is persuasion, and the focus is very much on practice. All knowledge is a condensed node in an agonistic power field." p.577
"History is a story Western culture buffs tell each other; science is a contestable text and a power field; the content is the form." p.577
"We unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our "embodied" accounts of the truth, and we ended up with one more excuse for not learning any post-Newtonian physics" p.578
"Humanistic Marxism was polluted at the source by its structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man and by its closely related impotence in relation to historicizing anything women did that didn't qualify for a wage." p.578
"Marxist starting points offered a way to get to our own versions of standpoint theories, insistent embodiment, a rich tradition of critiquing hegemony without disempowering positivisms and relativisms and a way to get nuanced theories of mediation." p.578
"Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others' practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions." p.579
"Feminists don't need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence, a story that loses track of its mediations just where someone might be held responsible for something, and unlimited instrumental power. We don't want a theory of innocent powers to represent the world, where language and bodies both fall into the bliss of organic symbiosis... but we do need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different - and power-differentiated- communities. We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life." p.579
The persistence of vision
"This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation." p.581
"This gaze signifies the unmarked category positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the word "objectivity" to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist and male-dominant societies, that is, here, in the belly of the monster, in the United States in the late 1980s." p.581
"Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges." p.581
"The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity... to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power." p.581
"[The] view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god trick." p.582
Through "insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision... and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as s route to disembodiment and second-birthing allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity." p.582
"objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility." p.583
"Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see." p.583
"The "eyes" made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life." p.583
"there is good reason to believe vision is better from below the brilliant space platforms of the powerful." p.583
Irresponsible knowledge claims: "unable to be called into account." p.583
"there also lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions" p.583 LINKS TO UMA NAYARAN AND A CRITICISM OF FEMINIST STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY
""Subjugated" standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world. But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the "highest" technoscientific visualizations." p.584
"The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connection called solidarity in politics and share conversations in epistemology." p.584
"Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally." p.584
"Relativism and totalization are both "god tricks" promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding Science." p.584
"One cannot "be" either a cell or a molecule - or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on - if one intends to see and see from these positions critically." p.585
"Vision is always a question of the power to see - and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices." p.585
"The Western eye has fundamentally been a wandering eye, a traveling lens." p.586
"Western feminists also inherit some skill in learning to participate in revisualizing worlds turned upside down in earth-transforming challenges to the views of the masters." p.586
"The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another." p.586
Define social constructionism: A theory of knowledge in sociology and communication theory that examines the development of jointly constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality.
Define relativism: the doctrine that knowledge, truth and morality exist in relation to culture, society or historical context, and are not absolute.
"feminists have both selectively and flexibly used and been trapped by two poles of a tempting dichotomy on the question of objectivity." p.576
"no insider's perspective is privileged, because all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as power moves, not moves toward truth. So, from the strong social constructionist perspective, why should we be cowed by scientists' descriptions of their activity and accomplishments; they and their patrons have stakes in throwing sand in our eyes." p.576
"Social constructionists make clear that official ideologies about objectivity and scientific method are particularly bad guides to how scientific knowledge is actually made." p.576
"social constructions might maintain that the ideological doctrine of scientific method and all the philosophical verbiage about epistemology were cooked up to distract our attention from getting to know the world effectively by practicing the sciences." p.577
Science is "rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power." p.577
"artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric. Practice is persuasion, and the focus is very much on practice. All knowledge is a condensed node in an agonistic power field." p.577
"History is a story Western culture buffs tell each other; science is a contestable text and a power field; the content is the form." p.577
"We unmasked the doctrines of objectivity because they threatened our budding sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our "embodied" accounts of the truth, and we ended up with one more excuse for not learning any post-Newtonian physics" p.578
"Humanistic Marxism was polluted at the source by its structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man and by its closely related impotence in relation to historicizing anything women did that didn't qualify for a wage." p.578
"Marxist starting points offered a way to get to our own versions of standpoint theories, insistent embodiment, a rich tradition of critiquing hegemony without disempowering positivisms and relativisms and a way to get nuanced theories of mediation." p.578
"Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others' practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions." p.579
"Feminists don't need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence, a story that loses track of its mediations just where someone might be held responsible for something, and unlimited instrumental power. We don't want a theory of innocent powers to represent the world, where language and bodies both fall into the bliss of organic symbiosis... but we do need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different - and power-differentiated- communities. We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life." p.579
The persistence of vision
"This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation." p.581
"This gaze signifies the unmarked category positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the word "objectivity" to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist and male-dominant societies, that is, here, in the belly of the monster, in the United States in the late 1980s." p.581
"Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges." p.581
"The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity... to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power." p.581
"[The] view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god trick." p.582
Through "insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision... and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as s route to disembodiment and second-birthing allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity." p.582
"objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility." p.583
"Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see." p.583
"The "eyes" made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life." p.583
"there is good reason to believe vision is better from below the brilliant space platforms of the powerful." p.583
Irresponsible knowledge claims: "unable to be called into account." p.583
"there also lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions" p.583 LINKS TO UMA NAYARAN AND A CRITICISM OF FEMINIST STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY
""Subjugated" standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world. But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the "highest" technoscientific visualizations." p.584
"The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connection called solidarity in politics and share conversations in epistemology." p.584
"Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally." p.584
"Relativism and totalization are both "god tricks" promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding Science." p.584
"One cannot "be" either a cell or a molecule - or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on - if one intends to see and see from these positions critically." p.585
"Vision is always a question of the power to see - and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices." p.585
"The Western eye has fundamentally been a wandering eye, a traveling lens." p.586
"Western feminists also inherit some skill in learning to participate in revisualizing worlds turned upside down in earth-transforming challenges to the views of the masters." p.586
"The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another." p.586
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